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Hut-Spawn!

As long as we’re on the topic of software coming out of the Hut, I should mention that my teeming minions (misshapen as they are, with their lumbering, shuffling gait and mouths full of pointy teeth going every which way and eyes that glow a baleful green mindful of radioactive fungus) and I were down in the code-spawning pits yesterday, where with a great slorching noise and a gush of unpleasant fluid we extracted an interesting specimen from its still-warm incubation pod, which lay buried in the primordial ooze for which this quiet Prague neighborhood is rightly famous.

Although technically Jer’s Flash Card Viewer has been available to the public for a long time, the version I’ve been using leaves that old thing in the dust. The catch was that I wanted to put in the registration stuff that Jer’s Novel Writer uses, so I could ask people for money. I figured it would take a couple of hours.

That estimate was about right – two hours of coding, plus the year and a half to get around to it. I hadn’t considered the time to make the icons for the application and the library files. The one I made yesterday for the library files is, well, awful. After an hour of cursing at The Gimp my standards went from something nice to something that didn’t suck to simply something recognizable. If anybody’s in the mood to get some credit towards their Fine Arts degree over at Muddled U., let me know.

JersFCV is just a drill-and-kill learning tool, but I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out. It tracks performance based on several criteria and prioritizes what “card” it shows based on that. In my use of the thing I find that the prioritization really helps me retain the information. Just when the word I always get wrong is fading in my head, bam! There it is again. Cards are grouped into levels, so you can choose what subset of your entire library to review. Overall, it’s pretty slick (for a flash card program).